Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday August 11, 2009 @06:01PM
from the if-I-want-bing-I-will-type-bing dept.

Jaeden Stormes writes "We just started getting word of a new browser hijack from our sales force. 'Some site called Bing?' they said. Sure enough, since the patches last night, their IE6 and IE7 installations are now routing all NXDOMAINs to Bing. Try it out — put in something like www.DoNotHijackMe.com." We've had mixed results here confirming this: one report that up-to-date IE8 behaves as described. Others tried installing all offered updates to systems running IE6 and IE7 and got no hijacking. Update: 08/11 23:24 GMT by KD: Readers are reporting that it's not Bing that comes up for a nonexistent domain, it's the user's default search engine (noting that at least one Microsoft update in the past changed the default to Bing). There may be nothing new here.

I'm using a Mac Pro that is... six years old and it's still working damn well. Not "adequately" - it's working incredibly well. Photoshop, Warcraft, Final Cut, Soundtrack Pro, and more. I would love to upgrade to a newer computer (namely something with an Intel chip) but I just can't justify upgrading because what I have now is more than sufficient.

Funny. I am typing this on a six year old no-name box that I got already one year obsolete from Tiger Direct for $500 and I have the same problem.

once you send the transaction to visa and it is accepted, this information should be PURGED. Period.

Not true. Lots of businesses hang on to your card number, especially if you will do repeat business with them, such as Amazon.

Network solutions is my registrar. They do not keep your CC by default, they ask your permission and there is a very good reason for them to do this. This is why:

My business has a few dozen domain names: our trademarks and a couple of names that are similar (typos that we don't want squatters to snatch up;.com,.net,.be,.fr variants, etc). They were all registered at different times and so there is usually one getting ready to expire every few weeks. We could make it part of the daily routine of one of our developers to check up on all of our domains and repurchase a new registration as needed. This costs money... lots of money if you add it up over a year. Besides, it introduces an element of human error: a few years ago, the company lost its primary domain name because the guy in charge of doing that had left and nobody thought to assign the job to somebody else. It cost us thousands of dollars to buy it back.

Alternatively, we can just allow Network Solutions to keep our CC number and re-register the domain automatically. It is easy and cheap. Of course, this kind of solution requires that Network Solutions not hire a retarded monkey to code its ERM...

The technology for this does not exist yet, but it will very soon. Look at the solar impulse aircraft, for example, that is going to attempt to fly around the world on solar power. It stores up electricity during the day so that it can fly through the night. Combine this thing with UAV technology and you have your 24/7 camera surveillance.

Another solution that pop into my mind are balloons that are tethered to the ground.

Parent is making a valid point that every location comes with the risk of a natural disaster in response to the absurd assertion that we should never put population centers in a place that can have a storm. People in Kansas have tornadoes, people in California have earth quakes. The solution is not to smugly deny that people live in areas that are victim to the phenomenon du jour, it is to find ways to mitigate those risks.

The danger that hurricanes pose is easily mitigated, just as tornado or earthquake dangers are easily mitigated. Most of those who lost their homes in New Orleans wouldn't have if the government had been doing its job and maintaining the dikes. People in Kansas are safe when the government puts tornado-warning infrastructure in place. People in California are safe when the highways and bridges are built to withstand shock. This is what we have government for.

If we only put population centers in places with no risk of natural disaster, the habitable surface of the earth would be small indeed.

Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday June 26, 2009 @12:35PM
from the trippity-hop dept.

It's the tripnaut! writes "The BBC reports that Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around 'as high as a kite', a government official has said. 'The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,' says Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania. 'Then they crash,' she added."

Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday June 22, 2009 @06:59PM
from the as-obvious-as-the-rubber-nose-on-your-face dept.

The National Institutes of Health has given $423,500 to researchers at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute to figure out why men don't like to wear condoms. The institute will also study why men have trouble using condoms and investigate "penile erection and sensitivity during condom application." "The project aims to understand the relationship between condom application and loss of erections and decreased sensation, including the role of condom skills and performance anxiety, and to find new ways to improve condom use among those who experience such problems," reads the abstract from Drs. Erick Janssen and Stephanie Sanders, both of the Kinsey Institute.

I have been living without using credit for a little over five years. It is not hard at all. The trick is this: you wait until you have the money for something before you buy it.

The hardest part is getting started. You need to build a small nest egg for capital purchases (car, house, etc) before going credit-free. Then, you need to have the discipline to replenish that nest egg once you make a capital purchase, even if it means tightening your belt sometimes.

In fact, phone plans are the only thing I can think of that I can't use. I also worry a bit about what will happen if I ever decide to go back into the credit game: voluntarily not using credit is as bad for your credit rating as a bankruptcy.

The towns around Chernoble have been abandoned for quite some time, which should satisfy your curiosity about how real cities decay if suddenly left alone.

Chernoble is also a great robotic testing ground because people still can't really go there for long periods, so no cheating.

The question of how cities would decay if humans suddenly died off en masse is moot. The reason is that before long, the world's nuclear reactors (especially the older designs) would start running out of coolant and going Chernoble themselves. Will Smith will not be fighting vampires 3 years later because radiation would have killed him already.

And, of course, we could use Chernoble for movie sets and kill off the god awful generation of actors that is plaguing American cinema.

Posted
by
Soulskillon Monday June 15, 2009 @06:37AM
from the why-not-go-for-flash-games-too-while-you're-at-it dept.

Kotaku reports that the ESRB is thinking about expanding their game ratings to include games sold on the App Store. They realize that evaluating every single game is not feasible, but they may still be underestimating the amount of work they'd be taking on, and it could negatively affect some developers. Quoting:
"'ESRB has seen increases in rating submissions each year since its founding and has always been able to keep pace,' the ESRB's Eliot Mizrachi told us. 'We have rated more than 70 mobile games to date and will undoubtedly rate more in the future as the market grows.' Seventy? Over the past, what, four or five years? It's a piddling number when you think of the hundreds of games available through the App Store. Further, many of them are mobile adjuncts to console releases, a different sort of beast from iPhone games. Not all of those need or deserve a rating; but if Apple brings in the ESRB to rate games, with the idea that it'll help parents control what their kids buy for their iPods, then unrated games are likely to be blocked by such filters. The incentive would definitely be there to get a game rated. And what of the cost? Getting a game rated isn't a free service; the ESRB levies a fee that covers the cost of looking through the code and rating the game."

Posted
by
kdawsonon Sunday June 14, 2009 @10:37PM
from the all-in-the-wrist dept.

layabout writes "We've seen tremendous advances in user interfaces over the past few years. Unfortunately, those UIs and supporting infrastructure exclude the disabled. In the same timeframe there has been virtually no advance in accessibility capabilities. It's the same old sticky keys, unicorn stick, speech recognition, text-to-speech that kind-of, sort-of, works except when you need to work with with real applications. Depending on whose numbers you use, anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 keyboard users are injured every year — some temporarily, some permanently. In time, almost 100% of keyboard users will have trouble typing and using many if not all mobile computing devices. My question to Slashdot: Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable, what's keeping you from volunteering and working with geeks who are already disabled? By spending time now building the interfaces and tools that will enable them to use computers more easily, you will also be ensuring your own ability to use them in the future." Follow the link for more background on this reader's query.

Speaking of browser innovation, why is it that we still don't have any major browsers that have detachable/retachable tabs? Konqueror has done this for years: you can right click on an open tab and detach it to its own window, or drag one window into another to consolidate them.

I personally find this really handy, to the point that I am willing to overlook that several popular javascript libraries (like jQuerry) are buggy in Konqueror which breaks a lot of useful websites (google aps, yahoo mail...) and I use it anyway.

Yet none of the other browser people have done this. Does anybody know why?

I was born in the United States, graduated high school in 1998 and college in 2002. I was in the Army for four years after that and right now I live in Belgium and am back in school working toward a masters.